Digital Movie Remastering – Flicker

I’ve been bombarded with questions today asking me about remastering of movies shot digitally. There are several issues when delivering a movie shot in digital to the consumer whether using DVD, Blu-ray or OTT streaming. These issues become greatly amplified when you start moving into the Ultra HD realm, especially with the various color space issues and HDR formats. With the consumer TV market HDR and UHD are not standard. Color space can be DCI-P3 or REC2020. HDR standards include HDR-10, DolbyVision, HLG and variations that TV manufacturers are implementing. Even within a single manufacturer you have sets that can generate different levels of brightness in HDR. You can have sets that max out at 500nits and others at 1,000 nits. When viewing video on the different levels of color and brightness you end up having a different threshold for the Flicker Fusion where the movement causes a visual flicker. On lower end panels this is much more noticable than higher end panels. It becomes really obvious when videos shot digitally at 50/60 fps is played back on sets that don’t support the higher frame rate and have to stepped down to 25/30 fps.

When preparing videos and movies to be streamed OTT you can improve the user experience substantially by creating different masters for various platforms from mobile phones to the highest end HDR Ultra HD television.

I had a conversation today with someone who was asking me about film remastering. His first question was “if a movie was shot in digital format, then you don’t have to do anything but encode it right?” While several movies are being shot in digital format, there is a long held belief by many in the industry that film provides a much better look and feel for movies. We first learned this when working on the Interstellar project where we had to review our compressed digital delivery along side the original film output. Directors all take great care in their art, and rightfully so, as it’s their expression to the world of story they want to show and tell. Some directors will even go as far as choosing the type of film that they shoot on to get a particular look. This attention to detail is something that we spent a lot of time on when working on The Good The Bad and The Ugly project as we not only were trying to recreate the directors vision of the film, but also to match the choices made in lighting and apply coloring techniques to recreate the style of the print.

There are several considerations that have to be made when delivering a movie to the consumer on a TV over the internet. First and foremost, we have to look at what can be done to optimize the number of bits that are being streamed while trying to retain the original vision of the movie. A typical stream is going to deliver 6 to 8 gigabytes of data, which has been compressed down from the original 4 to 7 terabytes of raw digital footage. There is a significant amount of data to remove in order to make that work.

There are many areas of remastering techniques that are used on both analog and digital masters. One area that we are currently doing a lot of experimentation with and seeing some great results is film grain. Film grain provides a unique look to a film and helps the video being shown to get away from that plastic look that is especially prevalent in modern video that is shot on high end digital sensors at 60 fps. While that look is really great for showing off the color and brightness of the latest generation 4K HDR television sets, it can be off-putting for a movie experience. This is where grain can be your friend. By having grain, film has a more natural and fluid look. Capturing that grain is your enemy however, when trying to create a compressed digital file to be streamed. Grain is realized in pixels as what appears to be random patterns of different variations in the lighting of textures within a scene. This typically wreaks havoc when you are trying to compress a scene as compression does really well when you have long stretches of the same colored pixels in a row and does far worse when there are lots of subtle variations. There are a lot of grain filters that can be used during the post production process that can take the digital images and make them appear move film like. Where we are doing a bunch of work is to add that filter post expansion on the client side within the player as opposed to upstream pre-compression. This allows us to gain a better compression ratio but still apply the same “look and feel” of the graining filter that was desired.

With new techniques and tools literally coming out every week, and new projects coming on board we have the fun job of both redoing movies we have previously remastered and compressed and applying the new methods to improve them as well as taking some of the latest and greatest state of the art digital movies and applying new methods to them to show even greater improvement. This job is sort of like the guys that paint the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s never done. By the time they get to one end, it’s time to go back and restart.

I’ve had a lot of people ask us about our 4K content, and given the fact that all 4K TV’s have built in scaling hardware, who cares what the source is, that they can save money by renting a Blu-ray or watching a movie for free on Netflix or Amazon and it will be just as good. Fortunately for us, that is simply not true. We’ve put a lot of effort into taking what the studio delivers to us, and making sure that we provide the best version of that film to the consumer’s end viewing device, whether it be the greatest OLED TV from LG or an Android phone from T-Mobile. You must start with the greatest quality source material, and then work your way down to the pixels that arrive to the screen, trying to do as little damage as possible along the way to recreate a cinematic like experience. With UltraFlix we’ve been able to surpass the quality offered in many of the second tier cinemas, and we certainly far exceed the quality of content delivery from our streaming competitors.

What is even cooler for me is last night I was able to get a small peak into the future of Film restoration and remastering technology and it is really cool. I can’t wait to be part of the next generation of digital delivery of Movies and TV shows as it’s getting better and better every year.

I’ve included a couple of comparisons of movies that we have worked on at 4K Studios and Deliver through the UltraFlix network so you can see that the source of where you get your 4K does matter, and that simple scaling by a TV does not result in the same quality experience.

Robocop Comparison UltraFlix, HBO Go, Amazon

Charade UltraFlix remastered by 4K Studios vs Netflix

My Way remastered by 4K Studios and delivered by UltraFlix compared to Amazon